ery old, all members of
society, who have to be supported by others, constitute the unfit. Many
are supported by friends and relatives, but year by year, it is becoming
more noticeable, that the moral guardians of the unfit are shirking
their responsibility and handing their defective relatives over to the
State and demanding their gratuitous support as a right.

Dr. MacGregor, Inspector of Asylums and Hospitals, N.Z., in his report
for 1898, p. 5, says:--

"As if the State had a vested interest in the degradation of its people,
I find that they, as fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, are
responding to our efforts to sap their self-respect by doing their
utmost to throw the cost of maintaining their relatives on the
ratepayers. I constantly hear the plea urged that as taxpayers and old
colonists they have a right to send their relatives to State
institutions."

Our social conditions manufacture defectives, and foster their
fertility. The strain and stress of modern competition excite an anxiety
and nervous tension under which many break down, and much of the
insanity that exists to-day is attributable to nervous strain in the
struggle of life.

The strong attractive force of one social stratum upon the next below,
excites in the latter a nervous tension which predisposes to a breakdown
in the face of some adversity.

The passion for ease and luxury, and the dread of poverty tend to
overstrain the nervous system, and numberless neurotic defectives fall
back upon society, and give themselves up to the propagation of their
kind.

Our charitable aid institutions tend largely to swell the numbers of the
great unfit.

Dr. MacGregor in one of his valuable and forcible reports upon our
charitable aid institutions, says:--

"Our lavish and indiscriminate outdoor relief, whose evils I am tired of
recapitulating,--our shameless abuse of the hospital system,--the
crowding of our asylums by people in their dotage, kept there because
there is no suitable place to send them to, and many of them sent by
friends anxious only to be relieved of the duty of supporting and caring
for them,--what is it all coming to?"...

"The practical outcome of our overlooking the continued accumulation of
degenerates among our people by our fostering of all kinds of weakness
will necessarily be, if it continues, that society will itself
degenerate. Taxation will increase by leaps and bounds, and the
industrious and self-respecting citizens